Replace Tea Party with rational Republicans

With the government shutdown fiasco, we have learned what TEA in Tea Party really stands for “Totally Egocentric Anarchists.” Tea Party legislators meet the definition of anarchist: a person who promotes disorder or excites revolt against any established rule or law.

They are certainly not patriots. They were willing to damage the U.S., its reputation, credit, and economy to oppose a law. That law (Obamacare) is largely based on previous Republican proposals and principles. The opposition — without any alternative solutions — seems based primarily on the fact that those Republican proposals are now embraced by a president who is not an old white guy.

They are not conservatives because the only things they seem to want to conserve are their personal bank accounts and the wealth of the rich. In this state they passed a law that could force landowners to allow oil companies to do fracking on their land to get at natural gas. At the national level, they want to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency so that corporations can pollute at will.

Before you think that the solution is to kick out all incumbents, remember that this mischief of the shutdown was caused by newly elected Tea Party legislators. If you want to avoid more mischief, kick out the Tea Party extremists and replace them with rational Republicans or Democrats.

Reading Room

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

We live in an age — the relativity of truth — in which Orwell’s adage seems as dated as monocles or top hats. Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution led to Social Darwinism, a philosophy pitting one human being against another with survival of the fittest as the supreme law for success, so Einstein’s theory of relativity changed popular philosophy and cultural mores as radically as it did the study of physics.

This Must Be the Place

Outside the Tipping Point Brewing windows on Main Street, heavy snowflakes cascaded upon downtown Waynesville last Wednesday night. Cars cautiously cruised through the intersection, with the snowfall increasing as the minutes ticked by.